No matter how many lawsuits are filed against the NFL, we’ll never know why Junior Seau killed himself last May.

Proof that Seau had a brain disease isn’t proof that the disease caused the former Chargers star to take his life.

Given another chance, would Seau have played football even if he knew more about its perils?

If the answer were yes, I doubt Seau’s loved ones would be shocked.

But by filing a wrongful death lawsuit against the NFL on Wednesday, Seau’s family is strengthening the quest to help protect other football players, both those playing now and those to come.

The NFL, faced with growing litigation from former players and the families of former players, will have to make the sport safer or risk going out of business. Just as hard hits tell on the football field, legal hits command attention in the football business.

“We know this lawsuit will not bring back Junior,” the Seau family said in a statement. “But it will send a message that the NFL needs to care for its former players, acknowledge its decades of deception on the issue of head injuries and player safety, and make the game safer for future generations.”

The lawsuit, which was filed in a San Diego courthouse, was as predictable as the hard hits that Seau delivered while playing linebacker for the Chargers.

Seau’s ex-wife, Gina, and others close to the former linebacker found it implausible that Seau hadn’t suffered a concussion during his 20-year NFL career, even though none of his teams’ injury reports listed him with one concussion.

On the same day last May that Seau was found dead, Gina Seau told a reporter that she was sure he’d suffered concussions, and that collisions on the football field had caused them.

Believing that Seau had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), former NFL lineman Kyle Turley urged a member of Seau’s foundation to have Seau’s brain studied.

Turley’s plea came on the same day that Seau, 43, shot himself in the chest at his Oceanside home.

This month, the National Institutes of Health reported that the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries."

Again, it's not clear that Seau's football collisions led to his CTE, or that CTE led to his death.

The NFL consistently has denied allegations similar to those in the lawsuit.